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Death, taxes, and "I'm going to Disneyland" — if there's one American tradition you can now count on more than Dick Clark ringing in the new year, it's the Super Bowl MVP looking into a confetti-covered camera and telling you his first championship stop will be an amusement park.

Make no doubt about it: The "Who Dat" hysteria may still be fresh, but Drew Brees already has a Disney commercial and mini-vacation twenty-three years in the making. So how, exactly, did such a cheesy line become unwritten law? And do football players actually, you know, enjoy the trip? We traced the secret history and tracked down a just-retired MVP for the bottom line on "being treated like royalty."

Not that NFL royalty came up with the damn thing. Turns out, in the winter of 1986, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner was out to dinner with pilots Dick Routan and Jeana Yaaeger and asked them their plans after setting a new world record for round-the-world aviation. "Well, we're going to Disneyland." Laughs ensued, but Eisner's wife smelled a catchphrase. With Super Bowl XXI just weeks away, an on-field crew was dispatched to corner Giants quarterback Phil Simms, who delivered the line with such precision that Disney's used it every year since — except in 2005, and that was a company preference, not a Patriots thing.

Five years earlier, then-St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner had emerged from nowhere to throw for 414 yards and two TDs in a Super Bowl even more dramatic than this Sunday's. And despite all the moments from a career he announced last month would now end, Warner remembers filming the Disney spot in 2000 like it was this Sunday.

"There was so much going on in the Georgia Dome moments after the game — you're hugging everyone, there's confetti coming from the ceiling, and someone from Disney with a camera grabs you and gets you to do the line," he explained from his home in Arizona this weekend. "I think I did three or four takes, just so they had a few in the can. It's all a blur, of course, but I definitely did more than one."

Of course there's the alternate script for Disneyworld, but are the MVPs, in fact, going? "The next day, my wife and I woke up very early and did interviews with all the morning shows," Warner said. "It still hadn't sunk in yet, and before we knew it, we were on a private jet being flown to Disneyland. I was Grand Marshall of the parade, I was shaking hands with everyone in the park, and being treated like royalty. It was exhausting, but a dream come true. Six months earlier, nobody knew my name."

Quarterbacks — even former grocery-store clerks — don't really have time for vacation during the season, but Disney's official MVP trip is a short, marketing-heavy affair. So Warner and his wife, Brenda, brought their von Trappian clan of seven children down to Disneyworld in Orlando a couple months into the off-season. "We could have stayed in that hotel suite the entire vacation," he said. "It was our family's first big trip together, and that hotel room alone was a major deal."

But Warner, like Brees but not exactly every NFL superstar, would rather a do-gooder deal than a fancy hotel room. So he took another trip to Disneyland — this time with ten terminally ill children brought together by Disney, his foundation, and the Make-A-Wish program. He's been making sure a similar group gets the first-class treatment every year since.

It remains to be seen whether anyone over the age of thirteen — let alone future Super Bowl heroes — will ever take Disneyland as seriously as Kurt Warner. But at least that company jet has been doing some good.